Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313)

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Edley told me he just hadn’t been interested in playing the game. Indeed, he had entered only a handful of events—including just one in 2010, the Nationals, where he finished with an 18–13 record. Edley has never liked playing online, and his delightful local sparring partner, Rose Kreiswirth, died of cancer in 2009. His rating sank at one point to 1795, its lowest ever. “I simply haven’t cared,” he said. “My energy is not the same.”

  But this is Edley, so recovery is always nigh. He noted that in the last few years he had authored five Scrabble puzzle books, four Scrabble calendars, two puzzle books for the boardless word-formation game Bananagrams (with more in the works), and one Bananagrams calendar. He was bursting with new word-game ideas, digital and analog, which he tested on players in Dallas. He was teaching Scrabble at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. He had moved into his own apartment. He was doing tai chi and teaching meditation. His prostate was fine—“I’m peeing like a teenager!”—and his eyes were good. “I’m a kid again. I’m having a ball.”

  And the Scrabble? Could Edley win a national championship in a fourth decade? “I’m not convinced I’m done,” he said. “If I lose twenty pounds, if I play more over the board, if I get back the feel, it’s possible. I’m not making any promises. I’m way too loose and flexible to set myself on any one course. That’s the beauty of it. If I do, I do. If I don’t, I don’t.”

  By the end of 2010, Edley was doing again. In a twenty-two game tournament in Albany, he found himself at Table 1 in the final game. He lost (to Kenji Matsumoto, a twentysomething star who wrote his college thesis on the influence of decision theory in Scrabble and other games), but his rating jumped 53 points to 1918. “Felt like I’m back on track,” he emailed me afterward. A few months later, Edley was up to 1980.

  In the next two years, Joe wrote more word games and word books, and played in a dozen multiday tournaments. But his biggest achievement might have been mentoring Scrabble’s newest prodigy, Mack Meller, who entered his first tournament at age 10 in 2010, had an expert rating at age 11, and surpassed 1800 at age 12. Then, on the first day of 2013, Mack finished a holiday tournament in Albany with an astounding record of 21–5, outpacing Edley and Sherman and a host of other experts. His new rating: 1997, fifteenth-best in North America.

  Lester Schonbrun’s back hurt and walking was increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. In late 2011, he had an MRI. The results weren’t good. A band of “leftover sleeper cells” from a long-ago bout of renal cancer had migrated to his spine.

  “There was a pretty, gemutlich doctor waiting for me when I got out of the MRI. She held my hand, wept with me, and gave all signals of ‘no more soup for you,’” Lester emailed me. “Then they did a CAT scan and said maybe it wasn’t as widespread as they originally thought. I was seriously thinking of declining the operation, because it sounded like a done deal. But the oncologist and the surgeon convinced me there was a good chance it was treatable. So I went for it, and was conscious for Giants–49ers, Giants–Packers, and Giants–New England.”

  The Giants beat the Patriots to win the Super Bowl and Les beat the cancer. Or at least beat it enough. Doctors found nodules in his lungs, but his oncologist told him they were growing so slowly that “the chances are overwhelming that something else will get me first.” So no chemotherapy, and Les was back to working twenty-five hours a week and playing in about as many tournaments as before “with slightly inferior results, which can be accounted for as much by the upsurge of wunderkind as dementia.”

  The last time we were together, in 2009, Les stomped the high-powered field at Mike Baron’s invitational tournament in Albuquerque, finishing 14–3 and winning $1,000. But Lester skipped the Nationals that year and has since, partly for reasons of age and expense, partly as a protest against NASPA. He hadn’t missed one since 1983.

  “My concentration and killer instinct are fading along with my word knowledge,” Lester reported, “but I still enjoy playing and occasionally surprise myself. I realize ruefully how much I depended on my edge in word knowledge and a sense of when to take a chance and/or play a phony. That rarely works anymore, even though there are some people still judging me by my clippings. So it’s all a crap shoot nowadays.”

  Lester recounted losing a game at a tourney because he misread a blank as an A instead of an E. He lost another one by challenging SUK, “a new three I must have learned and quickly forgot.” In an endgame at another event, his opponent blocked Lester’s SIENITE, “and Mr. Tunnel-Vision didn’t think of playing SIENITE+N, starting with N.” (NINETIES, which is also EINSTEIN.)

  “So that’s what must be endured,” he said. “But I look forward to each new tournament.”

  And politics? A black man in the White House? “Us commies were warmed by Obama’s election,” Lester wrote, “but I never had expectations he’d change anything. The late [labor organizer and folk musician] Utah Phillips used to say, ‘If voting changed anything, it’d be against the law.’”

  Matt and Marlon. Marlon and Matt. They’re linked in the mind of anyone who read this book or saw Word Wars. But not in life anymore. I saw them nearly come to blows in Danbury in 2002, but there was no specific falling out. In part, I think, they just grew tired of each other.

  The significant change in Marlon’s life was the death of his mother, Hattie, in 2008. Diabetes claimed one of Hattie’s legs, then the other. Kidney dialysis was her other burden. She died of a heart attack in the hospital before a treatment. In the last years of Hattie’s life, Marlon was her primary caregiver. I asked whether he misses her. “Every day.”

  Marlon still doesn’t have, and doesn’t want, full-time work. He’s done some taxes, and some painting and other odd jobs, and he helped renovate the house, replastering walls and sanding floors. Before she died Hattie sold it to Marlon’s ex-girlfriend, who lives there with him and her brother. One part of the house wasn’t renovated: the basement, where Marlon sleeps.

  In 2006, while pushing Hattie’s wheelchair up the ramp into the house, Marlon told me, he suffered a heart attack—“a car-di-o in-farc-tion” he enunciated in his best white man’s voice. He didn’t make follow-up visits to a doctor and wouldn’t take medication. Just Hattie’s prescription: a teaspoon of vinegar a day. High blood pressure? Nothing. Gallstones? Lemon and olive oil and wait for them to pass. Marlon said he’s not worried about dying.

  “You are a stubborn motherfucker,” I told him.

  “Yup. Yup. I get that straight from Hattie,” Marlon said. “I live what I believe. Nobody come here to stay. If my shit don’t work, my shit don’t work, and I just go away from here.”

  “Well, I better come and see you before you go.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere!”

  For months after playing in the 2009 Nationals (17–14, 35th place), Marlon didn’t play or study. But he still considered himself as good as anyone. And he was still angry that bowling money hadn’t happened. “All those years it was waiting for you to come calling, for the media to come calling,” he said. “It was obvious there was something there.” He blamed the NSA, and now NASPA, for failing to capitalize on the attention and the personalities, for failing to turn the game into a profession for the very best few. And he blamed the players collectively for failing to pressure the organizers to do more. “I said ‘greedy and stupid’ a long time ago,” Marlon said. “We lost heat. And that’s the players’ fault.”

  At that time, in 2010, Marlon told me he was done with North American Scrabble. The money stinks. It’s ree-dick-uh-luss. But he had started studying Collins, twenty pages a day. “If I play Scrabble again, it’s going to be for money, and when I go overseas, I’m gonna stay,” he said. “Once you see my name show up in Malaysia, I’m gone. I ain’t coming back here. And I’m getting to that point.”

  Marlon didn’t go, of course. And he didn’t play in a single Collins tournament. And he returned to NASPA events. And his rating stayed in the high 1800s
and low 1900s. Until, that is, over the course of four straight losing tournaments in 2012, it dived from 1912 to 1720, the lowest since he started playing almost twenty years earlier. At the last event, an understandably frustrated Marlon had an outburst and was suspended from tournament play for six months.

  This time, he promised, he was really done. He was still studying Collins. Thirty thousand words down cold, another twenty that needed work, twenty more still unstudied. He didn’t want to play tournaments until he could play the right way, with the full lexicon at his disposal.

  “I ain’t the kind to sit down to play if I don’t know what I’m doin’,” Marlon said. “I ain’t no fuckin’ hobbyist. I don’t need no fuckin’ hobby.”

  As for Matt, he disliked the way he was portrayed in this book, and as a result we were out of touch for years. When I emailed him in late 2010 about this afterword, which I first wrote for a tenth anniversary edition, and asked to get together, he agreed. When a mutual Scrabble friend offered to tag along, I accepted.

  Matt is living in a much bigger and much tidier apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. I visited for an afternoon and we had a vintage encounter. Matt talked virtually nonstop for ninety minutes. He was funny and angry, self-deprecating and self-aware, accusatory and defensive. And brutally honest. He said that after Word Freak was published, he “despised” me. “If I saw you in an alley, I would have broken both your legs.” The book, he said in a way that was both acid and amusing, cost him thirty first dates. “That was a terrible period in my life, and the book was just another terrible thing in it that helped me get to where I needed to be.”

  In the subsequent years, Matt told me, he worked three short stints writing for Conan O’Brien. He said he got more jokes on the air than the other writers but was passed over for a full-time position. Afterward, he quit drinking for good. “I was in bad shape, but one of the biggest things I realized was I could not finance my drinking,” he said. “I didn’t mind if I was some guy covered in puke in Times Square. The problem is—how much money do people give you when you’re that pathetic? Nobody gives money to these people. How are you going to get a buzz on? One Budweiser doesn’t do it when you’ve been drinking a case a day for seventeen years. You’d rather have none. So I opted for none. And found, amazingly, that once I went to none my life picked up in other ways.”

  Matt enrolled briefly at a small college in Queens, solely to try out, at age thirty-eight, for its basketball team; he said he played well but was the last player cut. He moved to Toronto for a year with a Scrabble-playing girlfriend. Back in New York, he wrote for the Game Show Network programs Chain Reaction and Grand Slam. The first was perfect for Matt. Contestants had to connect two words via a series of couplets. Matt recited one that he wrote: blackberry-brandy-Alexander-Pope-mobile-Alabama-slammer. “I wished it had lasted longer because I loved writing it,” Matt said. Both shows were canceled after short runs.

  Matt said he wasn’t pursuing work. He was making a little money teaching and playing Scrabble, and playing poker too. Matt had played in just four Scrabble tournaments in the two previous years. But he picked his spots well. In 2008 he won $3,500 in a high-stakes event in New York, and he finished fifth in the Nationals, winning $1,220. His rating was 1884. What was keeping him from playing more, and from working, he said, was his desire to stay home to care for his ailing cat, Ruth.

  Matt said he expected to come off here as still eccentric: the familiar jars of vitamins, the hundreds of unopened DVD box sets he was collecting, choosing a cat over a job. I wanted to see beyond that, and, whether he believes it or not, always have. Matt is who he is. Still sharp, manic, compulsive, entertaining. But also sober, in great shape, seemingly stable. “If you found me to be more together or successful or having weathered the years well, I think that case can be made,” Matt said. “I think I’m pretty far along, stunningly so. A lot of people don’t make changes in their lives.”

  In 2012, Matt’s life changed even more, with a one-man show, This Too Shall Suck, which debuted at the New York International Fringe Festival.

  Matt said he started writing the autobiographical monologue because he was in “my usual revved-up state over something that made me kooky... probably some chick thing.” Also Ruth, the cat (who was male), died. And he was running out of money. Matt was ready to channel his thoughts back into art. This Too Shall Suck (which, as I write, I have not yet seen) is Matt being Matt: manic, smart, funny, outraged, confessional. It’s about cats and comedy and women and Scrabble, about obsession and anger and failure and addiction. Matt talks about the suicide attempt to which I alluded a few pages back, and about a short stay in a hospital psychiatric ward that occurred when we were spending time together, during Matt’s worst days, but which I left out of the narrative. Onstage, Matt wears a T-shirt that says REAL MEN LOVE CATS and performs for more than an hour.

  “I haven’t a bad review yet and nobody’s been snooty, which is cool,” Matt said when we talked in early 2013, during the show’s extended weekly run at a small theater in SoHo. Matt had received a good amount of publicity: a rambling podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron (during which Matt accused me, though not by name, of being a journalistic parasite), and profiles and reviews in newspapers and blogs (including one in which he played a game of Scrabble blindfolded). The New York Times called the show “funny, oddball, occasionally awkward”; a USA Today blog said the “overall effect is of a darker, funnier Spalding Gray.” That sounds like the Matt I know. Another reviewer said “this is not a performer hitting his marks and more a unique soul who haltingly, desperately needs to share his story the only way he knows how.” That would be Matt too. The Associated Press called the show “oddly appealing, sometimes poignant.” You need many more words to describe Matt, of course, but those four are a pretty good start.

  Matt told me he’d been contacted by a book agent and had written a five-thousand-word proposal for a memoir. He was exploring ways to adapt This Too Shall Suck for television. He said he might perform it at comedy festivals in Montreal and Edinburgh. He was planning to write a new piece for the 2013 Fringe Festival.

  I told Matt I was genuinely happy for the success, and hoped it continued. He said he was grateful for the opportunity to perform something that might “give people a little bit of hope.” But he was also even-keeled about his good run, skeptical about the business, and drained by the pressure of filling the fifty-five-seat theater week after week.

  “Just as I was never, through cockiness or forbearance, down on myself in the worst times, I’m not up on myself in the best times,” Matt said. “But, yeah, it feels good. It helps the self-esteem to get something accomplished. I’m real happy and I feel real fortunate.”

  The next sentence is painful to write. My rating—the number that, at the end of this book, filled me with such pride—sank, tumbled, plunged, plummeted to, in 2011, a thoroughly humiliating 1434.

  The decline was gradual and inevitable. One year after this book was published, I was the married father of a six-pound, two-ounce, inexplicably fair-haired girl. (While very pregnant, my wife, Melissa Block, played in her first tournament. She went 3–3 and was not pleased.) A few months after the birth of our daughter, Chloe, we moved to Washington. Studying words wasn’t a priority. But I kept playing anyway, with predictable results.

  February 2002, Danbury (Division 1): 6–14, 1671. August 2002, San Diego Nationals (Division 2): 12–18–1, 1572. June 2005, Philadelphia: 1–6, 1545. Then back over 1600. Then back under. August 2005, Reno, my best showing in a Nationals to date (though in Division 3): 17–11, nineteenth place, 1570. Over 1600 again. Then the horror. October 2007, New York (Division 1): 2–12–1, 1559. June 2009, Mike Baron’s house: 7–10, 1540. August 2010, Dallas Nationals (Division 2): 13–18, 1473. And, finally, March 2011, Bethesda, Maryland (Division 1): 3–11, that number a couple of paragraphs above.

  During these mortifying performances, I would joke that I was writing a sequel: Word Freak II: Retu
rn to the Blue-Hairs. After them, I would begin a remedial course of action. And then I would abandon it. Excuses were plentiful—work and parenthood chief among them—and not unreasonable. But the truth is that I had time to study. I left the Journal in 2006 to write another book. I was freelancing. I could have found twenty minutes a day to anagram some sevens. I just didn’t.

  (That last book, by the way, is about my summer as a forty-three-year-old placekicker in training camp with the Denver Broncos. On my first day with the team, the six-foot-six, 285-pound tight end in the neighboring locker, Chad Mustard, told me he had read Word Freak and loved the game. Almost every day between practice sessions Chad and I and a couple of other players gathered in the quarterbacks’ meeting room and moved tiles. Seriously.)

  How to explain my lack of drive, the loss of ambition? I’d go with a persistent, inextinguishable, overabundance of self-awareness: I’d never be one of the greats, so why keep pushing the boulder up the hill? But that’s too easy, and too self-defeating. I might not have been as sharp over the board as I once was, but I didn’t feel overmatched. In that last, awful tournament in Bethesda, I lost to young Sam Rosin by one point and to another 1900 player who played TOFFEES for 114 points and two turns later bingoed out with sCURRILE. I was still making the occasional nice play—CARYATID through the I; a winning out-play of ORdNANCE through the first N—and I scored above 600 a couple of times. But I also was still seeing the one or two mistakes that cost me games, often while making them. And I was still angry after my tournament defeats and, at its nadir, deeply embarrassed by my rating, and what it said about me. And I knew that not studying consistently was at least partly to blame. My failings, naked as a newborn, repeating themselves in a cycle as sure as the tides.

  And then I said, screw it, enough. I started studying, regularly. Before the 2011 Nationals, I redid the fours and the top 3,000 sevens and top 2,000 eights, anagramming on my iPhone as I pedaled at the gym or rode the Metro or performed biological necessities. After the Nationals, I finally did the fives, all 8,938 of them. When I finished those, I decided to do all of the sevens, 24,029, in whatever random order Zyzzyva decided to present. I’m about 4,000 in now. Here are the last five: ADMRSTU, ABEELNU, ABEHNRY, EJKNSTU, ACDELQU. (Answers: DURMAST/MUSTARD, NEBULAE, ABHENRY, JUNKETS, CALQUED.)